


Moral Alignment

by TheColorBlue



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 19:10:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a scale of zero to one hundred, Flame Princess isn't sure where she falls on the "good" to "evil" scale.<br/>Frankly, she's never had to rate herself before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moral Alignment

Before Finn, Flame Princess never really thought about what it meant to be “good” or “evil;” actually, reflecting back on it, maybe it’s kind of weird, given how much her Dad is always sneaking around these days, whispering stuff about “evil evil evil” in her ears when he thinks she won’t notice. 

Or “ebil,” the way it sounds when his voice is rumbling that low. 

Anyway. 

Maybe evil was just one of those things that she always took for granted, but it’s hard to tell given that nobody ever really quantified it for her. She could tick off the facts, but it never really added up to anything except normal. Her dad locks her up in a lamp. Courtiers get snuffed down to little flame kittens, or executed with ice in their ears if her dad was feeling particularly riled up. Nobody ever really talked about good or evil before Finn showed up. 

Flame Princess still isn’t sure how she feels all about this. What Finn does is that he shows up and cries all the time like a wee baby and there’s all that water, so she figures right off the bat that he’s a water elemental. Then he talks all the time about doing good and being good and being a hero and going on adventures, and Flame Princess likes Finn, so she guesses that she likes things that are “good.” 

She decides that she doesn’t like things that are “evil” because apparently her dad is all about ebil and he had no qualms about locking her up in lamps. 

\--

Before Finn, Flame Princess only was interested in anything when it was lit up and burning up and beautiful. Maybe liking someone who’s made up of so much water and wet stuff is starting to get to her. Eventually, she starts appreciating all those tricks he does with spitting water and blowing bubbles. She starts appreciating the look of water even, maybe a little, even though she’s not going to go so far as to get physically near the stuff, nope. Not any closer than can be helped anyway. 

Then Jake starts introducing stuff to her like bacon sandwiches and fancy tea, and then everything gets weirder.

Actually, she likes tea. She bubbles her little cups of the stuff up to boiling and then sniffs the smell of it. The smell of tea reminds her of her scented candles. It’s nice. 

Finn and Jake invite her over and make her foil mitts so that she can touch things, kind of, without burning up all of their junk-stuff lying around. Even though she’s pretty sure everything is better burning up, she’s starting to respect certain boundaries. They put foil on their furniture so that she can sit down without worrying about slowly smoking a hole through the seat (even though there’s not better smell than the smoky smell of wood, burning up like a campfire). 

Finn teaches her how to play cards. 

It’s really weird. 

Flame Princess used to play games by herself using fire shaped into things in the air, or she’d amuse herself by burning up courtiers into flame kittens, or whatever. 

In Finn and Jake’s tree house—in the grasslands in general—everything is in weird colors, with weird textures. There’s all that weird green of the grass, and the moist green of the trees. The sky is blue instead of smoky. Finn and Jake have a lot of gold and treasure around their house, which is kind of nice with the familiar glitter and sparkle of it (her dad was always a big fan of gold and treasure), but then Finn shows her weird stuff like paper cards. Flame Princess has to practice to pick them up with her foil mittens. Paper is weird. Paper doesn’t survive more than maybe in a second in the Fire Kingdom before disintegrating into ash. 

Finn lays them out on the table for her, and she pats them around with metallic taps of her foil-wrapped hands. 

She can feel Finn’s eyes watching her, and she glowers down at the cards that keep sliding around underneath the smooth foil. Then Finn stands up and wanders over to the kitchen. Then he comes back with animal oven mitts on his hands. Okay, so it’s kind of cute. He pats the cards around with her, and then they both try to figure out how to hold a full hand of cards without the actual use of their fingers. 

\--

A week later, after the dungeon crawl and before Finn has decided about whether he wants to take Flame Princess to a farmer’s market or not, Marceline the Vampire Queen floats by the window while they’re all hanging out playing video games with Beemo. She’s the one who catches Flame King spying again from the stove. 

After they’ve embarrassed her dad enough to get him to go away (her dad is the most annoying dad ever), Marceline floats over to Flame Princess. She says, “FP, dads are an embarrassment, don’t even worry about him. _My_ dad was always trying to get me to take over the family business just like him, chaotic evil in the Nightosphere. Totally boring.” 

Marceline then makes a noise like a cheerful hiss, showing fang and the whites in suddenly very dark eyes. 

Then she circles around to filch apples from the fruit basket, and Jake yells at her when she throws them at his head. 

Flame Princess looks down at the remote control she’s been clumsily using through her foil mitts. She’s sitting on several more sheets of aluminum foil, and the surfaces of them are cool against her legs. 

She wants to take off her foil mitts. 

She really wants to take them off.

But Beemo is her friend, and Jake is her friend, and Finn is her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even really know Marceline, but if she’s not careful she’s going to burn down the whole tree house around them. At this point, everything has been so weirded up that she’s not even sure if what she’s thinking about has anything to do with good and evil or not, or if listening to everyone talk about this kind of stuff is just screwing with her head. 

She narrows her eyes and tries to focus on the little characters running across Beemo’s screen, and at her little character with a giant sword that she’s using to smash bricks and skeletons and other junk.

She’s not going to take off her oven mitts because that’s the decision that she wants. 

And that’s it. 

\--

She can’t make any promises about farmer’s markets though.

Because, you know.

 _Farmer’s markets_.

Full of delicious torchables. 

And, uh, probably dens of vice and nests of evil.

...Yeah. 

Probably.


End file.
